Tyshawn Sorey Trio The Susceptible Now 2LP

The Susceptible Now from drummer and 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winner Tyshawn Sorey covers a surprising set of some of his favorite music. Featuring his trio of Aaron Diehl on piano and Harish Raghavan on bass, the album follows on the heels of his masterful release Continuing, which was voted #4 release of 2023 by the Francis Davis Poll of over 150 jazz critics, and was hailed by The Guardian as "5-Stars: simmering with reinventions of old magic... One of the year's special sets."

The 2024 release continues to expand on Sorey's ongoing partnership with Diehl, now their fourth album together. The trio presents the McCoy Tyner classic "Peresina" from his album Expansions; "A Chair in the Sky" from the Joni Mitchell album Mingus; "Bealtine" from Brad Mehldau; and "Your Good Lies," a contemporary soul song from the group Vividry.

Predictably, Sorey completely deconstructs these compositions, extracting and shuffling sections of the original recordings while arranging them into elaborate forms that morph constantly and unpredictably. The program is played without breaks, magnifying its focused intensity while creating a prodigious sense of scale more akin to a tone poem than a piano trio performance. It's yet another manifestation of Sorey's profound musical wizardry.

The musical language TST further developed and articulated on Susceptible Now is sophisticated, surprisingly accessible, and perhaps even timeless.